OK - how do I build ships that actually DO bite?

Hi!

Research better weapons, research bigger hulls, research more minaturization, kick a..!

To kick a.. even harder, get luck and as many military and speed bonuses as you can.

BR, Iztok

DK,

Do what Iztok says. But I would add more clearly, build your own ships. It sounds like from your post that you are using the template ships that become available during the game. The template ships are weak and you are practically giving away the game by doing this. Besides those ships tend to have things on there, like life support, that take up space. The AI builds it's own ships, you need to do the same.

So to sum up. Design your own ships from scratch. Research weapons, bigger hulls, minaturization, defences and engine tech. Build military mining starbases too. If you find a/some little red cone/s, get your constructors there asap. Those go a long way in making your ships even stronger.

Many thanks for the replies, much appreciated.

I have been using the ships supplied and get fried every time! BUT - I'm not going to give up and will use your advice and try again.........just so I can get my own back on that two-faced Altarian Alliance!

All the best, DK

And Logistics. What you can't fix with a bigger ship and can sometimes be fixed by putting more of them in a fleet...

If your playing DA, you might want to give DL a go.

DL has a very nice fleet advantage for tiny ships against large ones. Meaning that if a large ship has 200 firepower and one tiny ship has 10 hitpoints then the big ship can only do 10 hitpoints dammage per round.

Right now i'm playing the DL campaign mission called apocolipse. on Masochistic level, Without the tiny ship advantage the dreadlords would kick my ass! Frankly i feel sorry for all you guys playing DA!

There I am, in my corner of the galaxy. Beavering away with six planets, making a buck here and there and not bothering anybody. Suddenly the bad guys turn up and KaPoW!!

I think my AI cheats. How come he has such powerful weapons and ships when I'm still developing the basic frying pan??

Back to the drawing board and try again......

I found that if I had enough money and some decent mid-level weapon and armor techs, I'd turn off all research and social building, dump everything into military production, and crank out fast, small ships with whatever money I had saved up. Swarms of smaller ships, as Mystikmind posted up there, seem to do better against the one hulking capital ship than you would think.

I just bought GC2 the other day, and am quite impressed. I came up right around the time Master of Orion 1 and 2 were released. This game does their legacy much honor.

Flood space with armed, empty tin cans and confuse the hell out of the enemy. Sounds like a plan to me!

I'm a big fan of the Total War series (Rome, Medieval II) as they have such high production values. I'm new to GC2 and while it can't compete with the graphics, the depth of strategy keeps drawing me back......

.......and then kicks the ships biscuits out of me

DK,

I would further recommend focusing. Either build ships that are all guns and engines, or build large/huge hull ships with minimal guns and huge armor values. Don't go partway.

While there are always exceptions, and every situation is different, broadly speaking smaller fighters will do the best if you field them in fleets with as high an attack value as possible. There are really two different benchmarks you are shooting for:

If you are going all offense, you want your total offense in a fleet to equal twice the armor+hps of an enemy fleet. If you do this, you will almost always destroy the enemies in just one round, if you get unlucky, maybe two rounds of combat. This stratey is even more effective with the Super Warrior special ability.

If you are going the defense route, you want your armor value on one ship to be equal or greater than half the attack value of an enemey fleet.

If you are able to create ships/fleets that can meet either of these milestones, you will almost always roll over the AI, regardless of military ratings.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for all the replies people.

I think starting GC2 with a huge map, all the civs and no experience is a bad move. The complexity of micromanaging too many colonized planets and developing a cohernent strategy can be distracting.

That's when the alien AI creeps up behind you and bites you on the ass!

Good advice regarding building ships and fleets and spend less time worrying about building that ice-cream machine on Gluttony V.

If only the other races didn't seem to arrive with a pistol on each hip and a mean attitude. I still think my AI cheats..........

If you are playing DA, you should due to the defense-bug not focus on weapons but on defense.
Research at least 2 kinds of defenses and place both equally on your ships witch are of Medium-hulls or larger. You then actually only need to add one (1) weapon of any kind to your ship. Now send your ship into battle and you should note that your defense will do well VS wrong kinds of weapons also. Actually you might even find your ship invinsible so that you don´t even need fleets at all.

Wyndstar you have piqued my interest on this thread. It seems to me that the combat ai generally picks on one ship in a fleet. Is there a way to trick it to go after the defense ladened ship and have other ships in the fleet with the offense? What I am imagining is a fleet with a strong defensive ship and several smaller offensive ships so that the defensive would take the attack of the ai fleet, and the offensive ships in my fleet would be able to attack the ai. That would seem more efficient than a swarm of defensive ships with small attack values. But you have analyzed these things much more than a casual player like myself could even imagine.

Is that just a nice way of saying you think I have no life?

It's alright, my wife would probably agree with you.

The AI will target the ship with the highest attack per hit point. So...
If you have two ships, one with attack 20 and hp 10, and another with attack 20 and hp 20, it will target the ship with less hp, because it figures that ship has 2 attack per hp. This has the advantage of making your more experienced ships be fired at last when in a fleet of other ships of the same design without experience.

For this reason, however, a mix of offense and defense ships doesn't really work. Your defense is useless on the defensive ships, while all of your offensive ships just get blown away. There are a few solutions to this problem.

- Sacrifce attack ships. Send in one attack ship all by itself with a high attack value to just weaken enemy fleets, before you send in your REAL fleets. You, like the AI, will automatically take out the enemy ships with the highest attack power. This will leave your target much weaker when the big experience boys move in to play mop-up.

- Use fleets of identical ships. I especially like this strategy with huge all "all armor" models, because their offense can be tiny, and you don't want your whole fleet to go *poof* because of the tie rule. If you aren't taking damage anyway, you up the survivability of the whole fleet, and then the whole fleet gains experience for everything you kill. If you are using fleets of identical ships, if after a battle one is weakened to a level that makes you uncomfortable (under half, under 25%, whatever), just remove it from the fleet for the rest of the turn, and continue attacking with your healthy ships. Then, at the end of the turn "fleet up" again, so that the enemy can't pick off your stragglers.

- Mix large and huge hulls. This doesn't work well, but at a point in the midgame is OK. See, large hulls can still pack a lot of defense. Your large hulls are taking the bulk of the damage in this scenario. The Huge hulls I use for this also have a high defense, but still a decent attack. Look at this scenario:
You have a large hull, 80 hp, 40 attack, 100 defense. You fleet it with huge hulls, 120 hp, 55 attack, any defense (or whatever). In this scenario, your large hull has more attack per hp (.5 vs. .46 for your huge), so the large hull will be targeted. But notice your huge hulls actually do more damage.

This setup works well until enemy fleet attack values start to rise above what a large hull can handle... and depending on your tech settings and difficulty level, that can happen really fast. At this point, you are going to need to switch to using all huge hulls.

Even then, this setup isn't great, because if you have already researched huge hulls, you could probably do better right fromt he get go sticking with them.

Anyway, hope that helps.

adding to Wyndstar's nice post as above,

Another trick is to avoid upgrading ships. So when you build new powerful ships with heavy defences, they should attract all the enemy fire because even with defence, their firepower is far superior to your old crappy ships.

So you save money on upgrading for the meantime, and your old crappy ships will gain experiance all the while untill you are finally ready to upgrade them.

No, Wyndstar, I envy your life. But my wife would kill me....if I can sneak 2 or 3 hours a nite I am lucky. I play on huge maps, so, its a week or two for me to finish a setting.

Thanks so much for your analysis, it makes much sense and is very helpful, cant wait to try it out.

Also thanks to Mystikmind....that sounds like a good cost cutting measure!

no problem!

Actually i discovered that trick by mistake... one time i had some crappy tiny fighters in an otherwise powerful fleet, you know, just to fill all the logistics points. Anyway, the stupid Thalans were attacking me for like what seemed forever with useless ships. They were on the other side of the map so i pretty much ignored them while i concentrated on other things.

Then when the powerful Alterians attacked me i had to rearrange my fleets and discovered the tiny ships had over 40 hitpoints each! so i upgraded them to make some pretty awesome ships with tiny amount of logistics!!

I have read far too many posts like this one! Stardock should have created better core ships but I also don't see why so many players don't know they can build custom ships!


Try setting spending to 100%!


Last year I played the entire DL campaign on Tough without losing any combat ships (just constructors and starbases). How could I easily destroy thousands of enemy ships (including those of the Dread Lords) without any losses?! First Strike! It does not matter how much attack your enemy has if he never gets to fire. Prior to DL 1.2, all attackers had the first strike advantage and now it is back in DA as the Super Warrior ability. The few times my all attack fleets could not take out the Dead Lords ship before he could return fire, they had leveled up enough (gained HPs) to take one hit. At first the Dread Lords only attacked with tiny and small ships without and defense, which my early fleets could take down in one shot. As the Dread Lords ships got bigger and started adding defense, my fleets got stronger (higher logistics meant more ships and bigger hulls(small->medium) plus better weapons). Things got interesting as they started creating fleets!


Exploiting a bug is cheese! Anyways, the devs claim this bug is fixed in the 1.6 betas but some believe it is still there.


I've read it divides the attack by the sum of the HP + defense but I can't confirm because I always fleet identical ships.

One final tip spend one race point at startup for the 25% luck bonus!

Absolutely! For anyone who dousn't know, this has a significant effect on the firepower of your ships.

It´s hard not to exploit when the bug screws up the whole defense system.  
You´d have to compleatly leave out defense from your ships to avoid exlpoiting this bug.

My experince playing with 1.6 beta 1 is that this bug was NOT fixed despite any claims.

Check out this link to Kryo's Fleetsim
WWW Link
There's also lots of other good threads on ships and the mathematical formulas used for combat. I have a link to Kryo's Fleetsim on my desk top. I see what the AI is building, use the Fleetsim to rate them to what I'm building, and make adjustments as necessary.
The goal is to achieve space superiority. Deny the enemy access to space, leaving him stranded on little islands that you capture at your convenience. This will lead to any of the victory conditions.
I try to achieve this by maintaining a technological lead. I find the AI tends to "zerg rush" (sorry for the use of the term). In the early game the AI tends to focus on weapons techs and building poor ships. I try to balance between my infrastructure supporting technology and some weapons so I can send up a few token fleets to deter war. I prefer to fight when I am ready. Minituarization is also a very important technological branch. It makes more of those cool components fit.
I design all my own ships. The core designs only take into account the most basic technologies needed for the design. I prefer the medium hull for late early to mid game as it can be balanced nicely and upgrades well later on. Tiny and small hulls have lots of effective uses. I try to leave the support modules off my combat ships. They get engines, defense and weapons. I would rather build starbases to increase my range.
Last I make adjustments as necessary, combat is kind of a rock paper scissors. If they have mass drivers, I put armor, and so on. In one game I was developing beam weapons and armor to counter their mass drivers. The enemy had weak shields (1). I gave the enemy a "virus" in the form of a slightly stronger armor (3). They started building their ships with armor against my beams. This works everytime. I picked this little trick up on another post here.
Search the forums and you will find many good strategies. Don't give up. This is a very challenging game. I lost my first few tries on easy, and by the time I got the hang of it, the Dread Lords showed up to humble me again. I hope this helps and good hunting.

Or you could only put the optimal defense on your ships for the AI weapons they will encounter.


I'm very sad to hear that since I'm playing a DA 1.6b2 game with super warrior (first strike) which I had planned to only build all attack ships.

Don't give up. This is a very challenging game. I lost my first few tries on easy, and by the time I got the hang of it.

Many thanks Jangerel, knowing I'm not the only one to lose on easy makes it so much easier to live with my incompetence!

I will soldier on and appreciate all the replies.

All the best, DK.